


Prologue - From The Life That You Always Knew

by Smaragdina



Series: Death Is All You Cradle [1]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Child Abuse, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-06
Updated: 2012-08-06
Packaged: 2017-11-11 14:34:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/479546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Smaragdina/pseuds/Smaragdina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Alexandra became Alex became Shepard and found the stars and searched them.” Character study piece. Prologue to the 'Death Is All You Cradle' series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prologue - From The Life That You Always Knew

**Author's Note:**

> Title is a line from "Come Away To The Water" by Maroon 5.

She doesn’t dream anymore.

Not the old dreams, the good dreams, good-person dreams. The Alexandra dreams. She is not _Alexandra_ anymore, just Alex: a new name that had been won at enlistment age eighteen with a buzz cut and razor scars on her scalp and the laugh of new recruits, all her matted-hair _past_ was shoved down the drain.

Her mother had named her Alexandra. Her mother had insisted.

“Your father wanted to name you Alexandria,” her mother had said, when Alexandra-not-Alex was four or five or six. Her voice was long and grating on the extra _i,_ causing cringes. “Alexandria, the city. Who the fuck names a kid after a city? He said a lot of famous people had been there, I asked him. People who’re dead. Psh. Who the fuck wants to be named after some dead guy?”

Her mother had been right.

Her mother’s skin was unhealthy pale and her hair was pale, so pale. Gold. Not Alex’s at all. And her teeth were white, white. Unhealthy white. When she smiled it lit the room like the sun exploding. Her mother had left no mark on her, not anything hard enough to bruise, thank God, red slaps fading as quickly as the highs of Red Sand. She'd left her not a single thing, not a mark at all. Not her hair, so golden. Crownlike. Their shared paled skin might have been the mark of malnutrition and not genetics. It is almost as though her mother never touched her.

It is only the eyes they share. They are gray. They are gunmetal steel.

Alex-not-Alexandra sits in her Normandy cabin (new, all new), watching the gray fade, watching scar and glowing red erase the last mark that her mother had left her. All her little-girl dreams.

Alexandra had dreamed of the Alliance, the press of blue uniforms and shiny brass buttons. The beat upon beat of disciplined feet. She’d looked to the sky and mapped out stars, touched tiny fingertips to the one that her father must be visiting next.

(“Good-for-nothing drunk,” said her mother, teeth flashing bright in the blackout dark. “Bastard. Asshole. Left me. Left us.” She’d curled her arms around Alexandra and tucked her close, stroked her shining smooth black hair. “He left us for the stars. We weren’t good enough for him. Don’t you dare run off to the stars like him, girl. Don’t you dare.”)

(Alexandra became _Alex_ became _Shepard_ and found the stars and searched them, and she searched the Alliance enlistment records for another _Shepard_ who’d left them both behind. Searched and searched and searched and found nothing. Found a father who had never existed).

Alexandra had dreamed of the stars and Alex had dreamed of fathers and finding home and Shepard, finally, had the idiot gall to dream for glory. In her Normandy cabin, shut tight away from her Cerberus crew, she watches the vids of her Spectre Induction. Over and over. She inspects them, critically, head tilted to the side. The her in the vid is tall and proud and pale. Her dark hair has long since grown out from the eighteen-year-old buzz cut that earned her name, and she already has her scars. They are not visible under the pressed crisp blue of uniform but they are there, every one. Or close enough. Each and every mark, the scars she'd won as Alexandra on the streets and as Alex in the training room, every sign and signal of her past. She does not have those scars anymore.

She sharpens her gaze and searches the eyes of the woman in the vid for any hint of Cerberus red.

If she sleeps, she is afraid that she will dream of those eyes turned husk-hollow blue.

She used to dream of other things, she knows. Alexandra had dreamed of open sky and space to run and hide and live, and even when the name _Shepard_ hung on her like a medal she had known more: she had been able to touch the scars on her skin and know the shape of each one. Know the story. Hold her past tightly enough to put it aside (or shove it, or scream-slam-door bury it, her mother smiling white in the dark). She’d known how to turn away to look forward.

Not anymore.

Now she has only her eyes, gunmetal gray shot with too-bright blood.

It is something Cerberus has left her. She has _only_ what Cerberus has left her, down to her bones, her skin turned all pale and pristine where she’d been stripped apart and jigsawed-together. Her old scars and the stories they told are gone, and in their place she has only machinery bleeding through in Sand-colored red. She does not dream anymore and when she does it is her eyes turning red to blue and even when she _does,_ properly,it is still a dream of what Cerberus took from her: the dream which feels like she’s always had and that she will _never_ lose. It’d been a nightmare in the life before her _death,_ and now she plays over and over again, critically, head tilted to the side, red eyes growing narrow.

This is what she has left.

Alex-not-Alexandra-not-Alexandria Shepard dreams of Akuze. She dreams it over and over. Death arching over her to blot out the sun. Her squad dying all around her, the scent of screams, her commanding officer disintegrating in a flash and a splash of sticky acid. Taste of blood in her mouth, some of it hers, some of it acid-tinged not. She runs through rubble that cracks under her step. She runs and she runs and she _runs._ Her squad is half gone and she is the one with the near-N7 training and they are her responsibility and still she _runs,_ even as they cry for help, as the cries grow wet and bubbled and frantic and fading. She runs. The earth is shaking under her feet and the earth is crumbling, everything is crumbling, the ground opens beneath her to swallow her whole. To swallow her down until nothing is left, until it can take the rest from her too.

Each night, she wakes the instant before it can finish.


End file.
